The Frame Packing Problem for CAN-FD

Abstract

CAN with flexible data rate (CAN-FD) allows transmission of larger payloads compared to standard CAN. However, efficient utilization of CAN-FD bandwidth space calls for a systematic strategy. The challenge arises from the nature of the frame sizes stipulated by CAN-FD as well as the heterogeneity of the periods of the messages and the signals. In this paper, we formulate a frame packing problem for CAN-FD with the optimization objective of bandwidth utilization while meeting temporal constraints. As part of the solution, first, we propose a formula to compute the best-case and the worst-case transmission times of the CAN-FD frames. Thereafter, we propose a framework that solves the optimization problem in pseudo-polynomial time. Experiments show the gains achieved by our framework. The results also show that, when applied to standard CAN, our heuristic provides improved results over existing techniques.